TERROR-LD TRIBUTES 2 LAST

Sourav Mishra, a survivor of the attack, said he was at the Cafe Leopold in Colaba when terrorists opened fire and he feels lucky to have survived.

"After bullets pierced my body, I somehow managed to escape through one of the doors and everything seemed like a movie scene then, all hazy. A local vendor outside the cafe took me to the hospital while I was all the time thinking I would not survive. I feel lucky today," Mishra said.

Joint Commissioner (Law and Order), Mumbai Police, Deven Bharti, who participated in a panel discussion at the exhibition, said security forces had never thought an attack of the magnitude of 26/11 would ever take place and that it was a "failure of imagination" on their part.

"We never thought there could be a terrorist attack at multiple points from the sea side. After the attacks, police of other countries had to change their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to handle 5-6 attacks at the same time," he said.

Bharti, who was with the Crime Branch when the attack took place, said the city police did not have SOPs to handle an attack of this magnitude then and the senior personnel did whatever they could with the help of their teams, grit and determination.

"That attack was a failure of our imagination. But today, we have a fighting force as good as National Security Guard (NSG) which is trained by agencies based in Israel, America and Germany. They are at par with any commandos. We can respond to a terror situation in a much better way today," he said. PTI MM ARS NM NP AAR

This is unedited, unformatted feed from the Press Trust of India wire.

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